Staff Profile

Professor Stephen Graham

Background

Introduction

Stephen Graham is an academic and author who researches cities and urban life. He is Professor of Cities and Society at the Global Urban Research Unit and is based in Newcastle University's School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape.

Professor Graham has a background in Geography, Planning and the Sociology of Technology. His research centres, in particular, on:

* Vertical aspects of cities and urban life

* Links between cities, technology and infrastructure

* Urban aspects of surveillance

* The mediation of urban life by digital technologies; and

* Links between security, militarisation and urban life.

Writing, publishing and lecturing across many countries and a variety of disciplines, Professor Graham has been Visiting Professor at MIT and NYU, amongst other institutions. The author, editor or co-author of seven major books, his work has been translated into eighteen languages.

Qualifications

Ph.D. (Science and Technology Policy), Programme for Policy Research in Engineering, Science and Technology (PREST), University of Manchester.

1989-1992 Urban Planner, then Economic Development Officer, Sheffield City Council

Honours and Awards

2011: Graham, S. (2010), Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism, nominated for the Orwell prize for political writing.

2004: Graham, S. and Marvin, S, (2001), Splintering Urbanism, nominated by the Urban Geography Speciality Group for the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers annual book prize.

1st Prize for best paper published in European Planning Studies during 1999: Graham, S. and Healey, P. (1999), “Relational concepts of space and place: Issues for Planning Theory and Practice”. European Planning Studies, 7(5), 623-646.

A wide range of Professor Graham's Powerpoint presentations is available at slideshare.

Influence and Impacts

In developing these themes, Prof. Graham's work has had a major influence on a wide variety of recent literatures and research trends in the social sciences and beyond. This influence has straddled three areas.

First, Prof. Graham's latest work, culminating in the Verso book Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers (October, 2016), is contributing much to fully three-dimensional re-theorisation of the politics of cities and geography. Through a series of interlinked chapters exploring everything from satellites, drones and helicopters through air pollution crises, skyscrapers, elevators and housing towers to bunkers, mines, basements and sewers, Vertical reimagines urban life fully into three-dimensions above, within and below ground. It explores what it means to be above or below in today’s rapidly urbanising world. As humans excavate deep into the earth, build ever-higher into the skies, and saturate airspaces and inner orbits with a myriad of vehicles, sensors and platforms, the book reveals like never before how might we understand the remarkable verticalities of our world?

Second, Prof. Graham's research is playing an important role as scholars from across the social and urban studies and activist communities seek to address the ways in which questions of security, war and political violence now permeate deeply into the everyday spaces, sites and circulations of urban life on a planet where 75% of the population is expected to live in urban areas by 2050. Most important here is the book Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (Verso, March, 2010) -- a major international and interdisciplinary exposé of the tightening connections across the world between urban life, militarism and security politics. The book was entered for the 2010 Orwell Prize for Political Writing.

The paperback version of the book, published in November 2011, was Nicholas Lezard's paperback of the week in the Guardian on December 13th, 2013. "Look, you're just going top have to read this book," Lezard says in his review. "After a while you begin to wonder whether books like this will be allowed to be published much longer." The Glasgow Herald, meanwhile, called the book an "agit-prop classic." "Superb..." Edwin Heathcote writes in the, Financial Times. "Graham builds on the writings of Mike Davis and Naomi Klein who have attempted to expose the hidden corporate and military structures behind everyday life.”

Cities Under Siege has had major impacts across the world's newspapers and activist networks. The daily Democracy Now TV show in the United States featured two discussions on the book, and interviews with Prof. Graham, in November 2011 (here and here) at the heights of the Occupy protests there. Chicago's influential 'Worldview' programme at the WBEZ radio station also ran a feature on the book on March 13th, 2012.

Finally, Prof. Graham's individual and collaborative work has been important to the resurgence of research on the politics of infrastructure in cities and the proliferation of 'splintered' styles of urban development (the term was coined in Prof. Graham's highly influential 2001 book with Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism). A more recent book, an edited collection through Routledge, New York, is Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructures Fail. It is the first book to look in detail at how the failure, disruption and destruction of key urban infrastructures -- communications, transport, energy, water -- impact on cities and urban life. A review is now available from Public Works, Management and Policy.Prof. Graham's work on infrastructure has featured in the 2011 film Bundled, Buried and Behind Closed Doors.

Prof. Graham's most recent collaborative book project on urban infrastructure, Infrastructural Lives (with Colin McFarlane) draws together a range of cutting-edge essays which focus on how modern urban life is necessarily maintained by huge completes of infrastructure.

Sept. 2003- Sept. 2005 British Academy Research Readership, £70,000, The Software-Sorted Society: Rethinking the Digital Divide (One of 15 in the UK - Included 24 month covering lectureship). An article on this project is available at the British Academy's web site.